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Fran's blog

The Ideas and Society discussion “Can we feed 9 billion in 2050?" at La Trobe University was profoundly disillusioning. The destructive structure of our global food system was apparently invisible to the panel. Instead much energy was devoted to claiming people concerned about GM crops are a huge problem. This was news to MADGE.

The question the panel should have addressed is “Since we produce enough food to feed 9 billion people right now, why are nearly 1 billion people hungry today?” The answers are not a secret, people are hungry because:

Why is Mark Lynas’s conversion from opponent to supporter of GM crops making news? It is a public relations response to the increasing rejection of GM in India, Europe, China, South America, Australia and the US.

Lynas claims his transformation is based on science but scientists, including Professor John Vandermeer of the University of Michigan, have dismissed Lynas’s understanding of GM as shallow. [i]

GM crops are promoted as being the answer to a world food crisis. But what food dilemmas is the world facing?